Author: Prof Jairos Kangira (Prof Jairos Kangira )

Ensuring the quality of higher education has been the core business of the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) since its inception by an Act of Parliament in 2003 (Act No 26 of 2003).

When I completed my Master of Philosophy in Linguistics degree, I was a teaching assistant at the University of Zimbabwe. My two colleagues and I started celebrating because we had spent four hard years researching and writing our theses since we were working as teaching assistants. 

The advent of Artificial Intelligence chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022 was celebrated by students, academics and researchers in higher education institutions, especially in the developed world. 

Today I decided to touch on a hot subject in higher education that I have always questioned when I read about it or hear it being discussed in academic circles – the subject of what a research-intensive university entails.

The 2023 academic year has started in earnest for those higher education institutions that follow the January to December academic year.

Our society is bedevilled with many problems, mainly because of our own making. We create problems for ourselves because of a lack of integrity. Here lies the biggest problem, lack of integrity.

The reputation of universities worldwide has been judged by how they perform on the world rankings of universities. 

One of the recommendations of the recently held national education conference was that student teachers must have more teaching practice time in schools before they graduate.

As the nation enters into the season of national and international examinations in public and private schools and colleges, we need, all of us, as responsible citizens, to open our eyes and ears in every corner of the country so that we detect any instances of examination leaks so that we preserve integrity in our examination system.

Recently, it has become trendy for many universities across the world to engage in reorganising their structures under the guise of genuine transformation that is supposed to bring efficiency in the running of these institutions and save billions of dollars in operation costs.